Perfect Wives, Other Women
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onclusion ‘‘Como anillo al dedo’’ If Empeños de una casa takes up, in its way, the story of the illegibility of the wife’s body that Perfect Wives, Other Women recounts, it also tells a very diﬀerent story. One could argue, in fact, that a reading of Sor Juana’s play does not ﬁt here ‘‘como anillo al dedo’’ [as a ring on a ﬁnger], to borrow Sancho Panza’s words, that it does not per- fect—complete—the readings of the textual wives of Luis de León andCalderóndelaBarca.Neitherconductmanualnorhonorplay, Em- peños oﬀers no prescriptions—textual or medical—for perfecting the wife’s body but, rather, flaunts its seductive imperfections.Womanly perfection can only be conjugated by the verb ‘‘estar’’ (‘‘estoy dama perfecta’’) in Sor Juana’s text; like gender itself, it is contingent, acci- dental—a positioned form of ‘‘being.’’ Illegibility in the play is not so much a source of anxiety (as in La perfecta casada) or a pretext for punishment (as in El médico de su honra) as it is a necessary condition for its plural erotic economies.What is more, the same illegibility that in Fray Luis and Calderón revolves around the question of adultery is deliberately transposed in Sor Juana’s drama onto categories of gen- der and race. Perhaps most notably, it is diﬃcult to locate in the play the inquisitorial subtexts that, I have argued, make La perfecta casada and El médico de su honra much more deﬁant and contestatory works than has previously been imagined. If Empeños contains traces of Sor Juana’s past run-ins with institutional power in New Spain (or hints of future ones), those traces, those hints, are subtle at best. But if the same tensions that make the wife’s body such a compel- ling site for reading various forms of anxiety in early modern Spain are either absent from or ﬁgure very diﬀerently in colonial Mexico (or in Sor Juana’s text), there is no question that Sor Juana is a worthy